Video aspect on homemade DVD

KayAt · Member Joined: 08 Feb 2002

I have a DVD from a horse show to use in my education program. It was done (we have permissions) by a video company in Florida and when I decrypt it with DVD Decrypter and open in Virtual Mod, it is not only wide screen but also looks squished from side to side (Tall, not wide enough)

Any ideas on why? I tried making the avi file wider in Sony Vegas, didn't seem to help. Also tried changing the aspect in Sony Vegas but the horse keeps running off the screen and its not practical to pan. (enough motion already).

Thanks for any suggestions.

stars · Member Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Location: In the Lighthouse

Hi the picture you got is how widescreen looks....

The normal DVD standard is 720x480 pixels (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL).

I full widescreen pic has got approx 720x404 pixels 720/404=1.78

In this case 1.78:1 aspect ratio or 16/9=1.777777778

But as I said early the dvd standard isnt 720x404 so we must rezie the picture to 720x480 pixels

Its why the picture looks distorted..

The output will be right because the movie file is encoded with the widescreen flag..

The dvdplayer or media player detect this flag and show the picture in the right format...

So if you are editing a widescreen source the output to the encoder must be 720x480 pixels
and the widescreen flag must be setr in the encoder program...

You cannot mix a 4:3 source with a 16:9 source. The only way to do this is to render the widescreen source
into a 4:3 letterbox format or use differnt VTS for the authored dvd...

regards stars....